


Ghosts

by veritascara



Series: Ad Astra [4]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: Rebels
Genre: Anger, Angst, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Pregnancy, Unplanned Pregnancy, post episode: s04e15 Family Reunion - And Farewell
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-18
Updated: 2018-07-18
Packaged: 2019-06-12 16:07:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,875
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15343506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/veritascara/pseuds/veritascara
Summary: When the dust on Lothal has settled, Sabine returns to their ship to sleep. She finds Hera there already, who delivers some shocking news.





	Ghosts

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to [Anoray](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anoray/pseuds/Anoray) for being my excellent beta babe again!
> 
> Thank you to everyone who continues to follow along with this series. I love and appreciate all of you! Fair warning that this is one of the most painful of the series, but after the next story things will start looking up for Hera again.

Slowly, Sabine climbed the ladder up to the Ghost’s main deck, her body and mind weary and ready to crash from the late hour and events of the day. The destruction of the Imperial dome had been followed by hours of planning and rallying the Lothalian people into some semblance of organization. She admired Ryder Azadi’s stamina, but building a government from scratch was not her forte, and all she really wanted right now was her own bed.

She pulled her helmet off and traced the few familiar steps through the corridor to her cabin in the darkness. This hall was always dimly lit during the Ghost’s night cycle, but tonight it felt especially gloomy—dark and full of ghosts, like all the stories her mother had told her as a small child of warriors from ages past hovering over the living to see that their legacies lived on and wills were carried out.

Sometimes she hated those stories. They felt too real in the silence, like if she were to just listen, she’d be able to hear their voices, spy their forms in the shadows. She strained her ears, but in the ship’s powered down mode all she could hear was her own breathing. It sounded too loud.

An odd sight in her peripheral vision caught Sabine’s attention just as she reached her room: the door to Kanan’s room across the hall was wide open, the entrance yawning and dark like a cave—or a sepulcher. She was sure that room hadn’t been opened in a couple weeks, not since before . . .

Her hand hovered over the controls to her door for a moment. She felt torn. Her fatigued limbs begged for sleep, but her curiosity won out, and she turned to step across the corridor and peer inside.

It took a minute for her eyes to adjust to the deeper darkness within his room, and she moved further in with careful, quiet steps, only the tiny red and white indicators set in the walls to light her way. Nothing seemed out of place on first glance, but then the sound of someone else’s rhythmic breathing caught her ears, and she squinted to look closer. There in the shadows, sitting against the wall on the lower bunk with her knees pulled up to her chest, was Hera. Her head rested on her knees, with her lekku hanging limp beside them.

Sabine’s heart fell. Hera had disappeared two hours ago, citing the need to check the ship’s systems—of course she’d be here.

Just Hera and the ghosts.

Cautiously, Sabine backed up a couple steps to the doorway to leave Hera to sleep in peace, when her helmet in her hand hit the door frame and clattered to the floor. “Kriff,” she muttered.

Hera’s head shot up. “Oh! Sabine.” She quickly shifted forward to sit up on the edge of the bed. “What do you need?”

“No, no. Sorry.” Sabine motioned with her hands for Hera to stay down as she bent to pick up her wayward helmet. “I just saw the door open and wondered why. Going to get some sleep now.”

“Yeah, another early morning tomorrow.” The forced cheerfulness in Hera’s voice melted away, leaving it flat, rough, betraying the depths of her exhaustion . . . and emotion. _Hera must have been in Kanan’s cabin ever since she’d said she was going to the ship_ , Sabine thought. It certainly wasn’t a place _she_ wanted to stay in.

“I’ll just–” Sabine stepped backwards, carefully centering herself in the doorway this time.

Hera didn’t move or respond. Her eyes remained fixed on an indeterminate point on the far wall, her face as blank as the gray metal surrounding them. Sabine imagined her own looked rather the same. She paused her steps.

“Hera,” she said, watching as the other woman lifted her head slowly to look at her. “Are you . . .” She paused for a moment, not knowing what to ask. Nothing felt adequate. At all. “Are you okay?”

Sabine winced. _Could she have asked a stupider question?_

Hera didn’t answer for a few moments and dropped her gaze. “Not really,” she said with a sigh.

Sabine let out a deep breath and looked down at the floor. “Me either, I guess,” she admitted, hugging her arms to her chest. It felt good to say that out loud—necessary.

Neither said anything for another minute, and Sabine felt frozen to her spot, hovering in the doorway between the worlds of the living and the dead and unsure which was which. She could hardly have moved if she’d tried.

“You can come in, if you want,” Hera offered.

“No, I–” Sabine began to protest, not wanting to bother Hera any more than she had to, but then stopped and bit her lip. If anything, it didn’t feel right to leave Hera alone like this. And if she were to admit it, she really didn’t want to be alone herself. Suddenly, the thought of being alone felt overwhelming, incomprehensible. “Yeah, okay.” She shuffled forward in the darkness towards the bunk. Hera scooted back and to the side to make room for her then resumed her curled up position against the back wall as before.

A couple minutes later, Sabine wondered if she had made a mistake. Hera said nothing further. The quiet grew between them until Sabine could hear her own heartbeat pounding in her ears, and she strained her vision for something to see in the darkness to distract her. The tiny lights near the floor illuminated Hera’s face just enough to see the unblinking glassiness in the Twi’lek’s eyes as she stared at the wall again. Even awake, her lekku drooped as if they’d somehow deflated. Her passive stillness unnerved Sabine and made her guts churn. It felt _wrong_. Hera was motion. Hera was action, always forging on, even in the most dire moments, strong as durasteel.

And now she seemed as fragile as ancient glass—like she might shatter into a thousand shards with the slightest blow.

Sabine looked away.

The barren, gray panels around her stared back, and not for the first time, Sabine wished Kanan had let her paint his room with something, anything. The barrenness of the space grated on her senses. But neither Kanan nor Hera had ever let her touch their cabins, although at least Hera’s had her own handiwork to adorn it.

Maybe she should paint something in here now, for Kanan. But wouldn’t that would be weird if . . . if they . . .

No, she couldn’t picture anyone else in this room, nor someone else in Ezra’s bunk either. Even now, their presences lingered in these spaces. If she closed her eyes she might be able to hear their voices again, hear their steps coming around the corner. There were Kanan’s heavy boots, and there was Ezra’s laugh. Maybe today they’d do some saber practice, invite her to join them. Nothing crazy, just a little fun, maybe a round of sparring. She had to keep in shape to stay ahead of Tristan, after all.

A deep sigh from Hera next to her interrupted Sabine’s train of thought and startled her back to the present. She turned her gaze to see Hera sitting with her head tilted back and eyes fixed on the base of the bunk above them, her lips pursed together. Then she spoke, hardly more than a whisper.

“I’m pregnant.”

Those two simple words made no sense in Sabine’s mind, and she struggled to find any coherent reply. “W– what?” she asked, shaking her head. Surely, she must be falling asleep.

Hera didn’t say anything for another minute, and Sabine let herself breathe again, almost certain she must have misheard, but then Hera said softly, “You heard right.”

Sabine gaped at Hera. The bottom dropped out of her stomach, and a thousand jumbled thoughts flooded her mind, most of them fueled by confusion or just outright shock.

“Hera,” she blurted out the first one that came to mind, “How did that even happen?”

 _Oh, karabast, why did she have to ask_ that _?_

Hera flopped her head towards Sabine to stare at her, her eyebrows raised.

“I mean . . . not _that,_ ” Sabine protested, feeling her cheeks burn with embarrassment. “I just thought . . . you two always seemed like the type to be careful.”

Hera let out a small snort that might have been a laugh, and Sabine’s tension eased a bit.

“We were.” Hera paused and Sabine felt Hera’s eyes meet hers, resignation lurking therein. “My implant died,” the other woman confessed.

“Oh.”

Hera didn’t volunteer any more information, and Sabine didn’t really know what else to say, despite feeling the weight of that last statement and all the things it implied like a loaded detonator waiting to explode in her hands. She reached up to her own arm to rub the similar gadget that resided there, wondering if there was any chance hers had suffered the same fate—not that she had ever needed it to perform that particular function—not really.

“What are you going to do?” she finally asked quietly.

“I don’t know,” Hera said.

“Huh, that’s a new one, coming from you.”

“I know.” Hera paused, then added, “I mean—guess I’ll have a baby. Who would have thought?”

This time it was Sabine’s turn to force out a laugh. And really, who wouldn’t? The situation felt simultaneously so dire and so absurd that to laugh was the only appropriate response, otherwise she would probably find herself falling apart. Because, despite all the times she had prided herself on her imagination, she couldn’t have pictured this. Not even a little bit. Hera was the last person in the galaxy Sabine would have pictured popping out a kid in the middle of a war.

But she kept this to herself.

“How long have you known?” Sabine asked, even softer than before.

“Just since this afternoon,” Hera whispered.

“Oh.” Sabine’s eyebrows shot up in surprise that Hera would actually tell her something so new. Of course, there was no one else she could tell it to . . . not anymore.

Certainly not the person who really deserved to know, whose presence now loomed even larger in the room than before.

“I’d suspected for a couple days, but didn’t have the chance to take a test until today,” Hera continued on. “Now I just wish . . . I wish that I could tell him.”

Hera paused and took in a shuddering breath, while Sabine waited silently, sensing that Hera wanted to say more. Her behavior tonight continued to surprise Sabine—this openness perhaps most of all. Sabine feared that if she even made a sound, the spell would break, and Hera might never speak on a personal subject again.

“Although the way he was acting that night he probably already knew—that idiot Jedi.”

Sabine couldn’t decide whether Hera’s words were laced more with fond remembrance or hidden bitterness—or perhaps a little of both. But the subject set her mind to spinning as Hera rambled on, “We’d never seriously talked about having a baby–”

How could Kanan have known? If Hera had only just found out, she couldn’t have been pregnant very long, and the fire was two weeks ago . . .

“–there was always the rebellion, and it was too dangerous–”

Ugh, her knowledge base of reproductive biology was severely lacking. And thinking about it in relation to Kanan and Hera was just . . . weird.

But she was fairly certain there was no way even the best technology could have told them something like that so soon. If Kanan had known, it really had to just be some Force thing, then. Idiot Jedi, indeed.

“–we had a family already. We had each other. We had you–”

But that would mean that Kanan knew exactly what he was leaving behind. Not just their family, as Sabine had understood it for the past four years, but his own biological child. Something inside of her blazed at that thought—Kanan abandoning his own flesh and blood. _The way her family had her_ , a still-healing wound deep inside whispered.

 _No, not the same. Not the same_ , she tried to tell herself. _It was to save us, to save Hera—and the baby—too._

But couldn’t there have been another way? There had to be? Why had it ended this way? With Hera left alone to raise a baby in the midst of fighting a war.

(“There’s always another way,” Hera had said earlier. But she’d been wrong then too.)

“–and we had Ezra.”

We _had_ Ezra.

Sabine’s anger flared even hotter. Kanan had died saving them, and now Ezra had sacrificed himself as well. For the greater good, for his people. She of all people should be able to appreciate that, but just right at this moment she didn’t care.

Only Hod Har’an, may he be damned, might know where in the galaxy Ezra was at this moment— _if_ he’d survived the jump into hyperspace or its aftermath. Angry tears threatened to escape her eyes, and she squeezed them shut tight, only to see the smoking hulk of the Chimaera playing behind her eyelids, its bridge and engines smashed by ravaging purrgil.

“–all we needed. I guess the Force thought I was wrong. About all of that.”

The Force. That was the crux of all of this, really. The Force had guided Kanan. The Force had guided Ezra. It had orchestrated everything. And just now she hated it alone more than anything else in the galaxy.

The Force should have shown them another way. It should have. It should.

Sabine realized that Hera had fallen silent beside her, and she turned her head and opened her eyes to find Hera gazing at her, her eyes solemn in the dim light.

“I’m sorry. I know this has been just as hard for you,” Hera said.

“No, it’s–” Sabine began to protest, but she couldn’t think of words to say, at least none that were honest. And she paused, gulping down deep breaths of air to fill her suddenly oxygen-starved lungs. She spent a couple minutes peering into the darkness, trying to reorient herself to the world around her and banish the evil specters that haunted her mind. The threatening tears abated slightly, and she compelled her thoughts away from her own grief back to Hera, who deserved them far more.

“I’ll be there for you, Hera. Always.”

“I can’t ask that of you, Sabine,” Hera said, but there was no conviction in her voice. Her words rang hollow.

“Hey.” Sabine plastered a small smile on her face, trying to appear as cheery as she could muster. She fidgeted with her hands in her lap, itching to reach out for Hera, but uncertain whether she could—whether she should. “We’re family, it’s what we do,” she finally said.

Hera let out a weary laugh, and Sabine joined in, but the relief only lasted a moment, and Hera quickly turned her focus away back to the bunk above her. Her chin quivered and voice shook as she whispered into the darkness, “I miss him, Sabine. I don’t know how I can do this without him.”

Sabine opened her mouth, wishing that words, meaningful, helpful ones, might come out, but none came. The only voice that might help Hera right now belonged to the Force. And though it was all around them, they could never truly touch it.

Hera’s eyes closed, and her jaw trembled more. Sabine watched as silent tears tracked down her cheeks, glittering like falling stars as they reflected the tiny lights around them. The sight startled Sabine, and it suddenly occurred to her, for the first time, just how _young_ Hera looked—young and scared.

Because Hera _was_ young. For all the storms Hera had mothered her through, Hera was still only twenty-eight years old, a mere eight years older than Sabine herself. In another life, they could have been sisters. And maybe that’s what they were now, or would be when the winds ceased blowing and shifting sands settled.

And they were still in this together.

Sabine’s anger melted away, leaving a gaping emptiness in its place, and the tears that continued to fall from Hera’s eyes began to fill her own as well. Tears for everything they’d lost—some that she’d held bottled up inside for weeks, some for what had taken place just today.

“Me too,” Sabine said. “I miss them too.” The confession made her feel small. And then the tears began falling, wave after wave punctuated by hiccuping sobs.

In the darkness, she felt Hera’s slender fingers wrap around her own, clasping their hands together, and she gasped in a deep breath, feeling the warmth of Hera’s gesture slowly threading its way through her being. Sabine squeezed back, hoping with all her being that her hand might tell Hera everything she couldn’t bring herself to say out loud.

Hera sighed. Neither woman spoke again nor released the other’s hand. Silence said more than enough. The ship creaked and groaned around them, likely in response to a gust of wind, but Sabine imagined she knew better. She was commiserating with them—with the grief of all those hidden in her belly.

Just Sabine and Hera. The baby.

And the ghosts.

**Author's Note:**

> For anyone curious regarding the artwork I mentioned in Hera's room, as it seems few people have noticed it, I posted a meta about it that you can read **[here](http://veritascara.tumblr.com/post/175960259833/hera-and-heritage-a-meta-in-pictures)**.
> 
> The next story will center on a conversation between Hera and Cham and is in progress. Also, I'm currently estimating nine total stories for this series (although that number keeps growing as more ideas pop up in my brain, haha).


End file.
